First, a big thanks to the Roon team for this software. After trying JRiver and a couple others I discovered Roon and it is exactly what I was looking for. After a few days, I gladly coughed up the money and became a “lifer”
I have several Bose SoundTouch radios around the house for background music and playback of spoken word files. Once I select the radio I want to use via either the PC or iPad app there is a 20 or so second delay until Airplay negotiates the connection. During this time, Roon is playing the track but no sound is coming from the radio.
Is this typical of AirPlay? Although I have had AirPlay devices in the house for quite some time, I don’t use it much. But with Roon’s tight integration with AirPlay and multiple zone support it would be great if the delay was not there.
BTW, server is on a Dell XPS8700 i7 with 24GB RAM, so no limitation there.
A 2-5s delay is typical with AirPlay. I’ve never heard of it taking 20s.
AirPlay is always a little bit sluggish feeling because of how the protocol was designed–the buffering happens in real-time, and the buffer is a few seconds long, so you end up waiting for that period of time before the stream starts.
Is iTunes much faster? In our testing (admittedly not with your exact hardware device), they tend to perform about the same.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, iTunes has a delay also - very noticeable when streaming video from the web. But not even close to the delay I described in the original post.
One of the Bose radios in a Group never completed AirPlay launch about an hour ago. I rebooted it (unplug, plug back in) and after it completed the radio’s startup, AirPlay came on immediately. So, the long delay could be a function of Bose’s AirPlay implementation. Something similar happened earlier this year where Pandora took a very long time to launch. Again, rebooting helped - for a while. A firmware update was released by Bose several weeks ago that fixed the Pandora problem, so maybe the issue is with the radios. Playback of anything from PCs is instant. Everything is on a Synology DS-1813+ so it should not be the problem.
Interesting that the increased bitrate of Tidal over Pandora is very evident even on those radios. Great job with the tight integration of Tidal. I have been a subscriber for several months but am using it far more often with Roon.
